The Mende are one of the two largest ethnic groups in Sierra Leone; their neighbours, the Temne people, constitute the largest ethnic group at 35.5% of the total population, which is slightly larger than the Mende at 31.2%. The Mende are predominantly found in the Southern Province and the Eastern Province. The Mende are mostly farmers and hunters. Some of the major cities with significant Mende populations include Bo, Kenema, Kailahun, and Moyamba.
The West Region is 14,000 km2 of territory located in the central-western portion of the Republic of Cameroon. It borders the Northwest Region to the northwest, the Adamawa Region to the northeast, the Centre Region to the southeast, the Littoral Region to the southwest, and the Southwest Region to the west. The West Region is the smallest of Cameroon's ten regions in area, yet it has the highest population density.
Mende is a major language of Sierra Leone, with some speakers in neighboring Liberia and Guinea. It is spoken by the Mende people and by other ethnic groups as a regional lingua franca in southern Sierra Leone.
The Bamum, sometimes called Bamoum, Bamun, Bamoun, or Mum, are a Grassfields ethnic group located in now Cameroon. In 2018, the Bamum and Bamileke peoples accounted for about 24% of the country's population. The Kingdom of Bamum covers approximately 7,300 km. The Kingdom of Bamum was surrounded to the north by the territory of Cameroon, from the west and south-west the kingdom's boundary touches the River Nun while the Rivers Mape and the Mbam surround it to the east.
Foumban or Fumban is a city in Cameroon, lying north east of Bafoussam. It has a population of 83,522. It is a major town for the Bamoun people and is home to a museum of traditional arts and culture. Foumban is known for its political significance in the formation of Cameroon's history and its cultural, tourism and economic potential. There is also a market and a craft centre, while Foumban Royal Palace contains a museum with information on Ibrahim Njoya who invented a new language script, Bamum script, and the artificial language Shümom.
Bamum, also known as Shupamem, Bamun, or Bamoun, is an Eastern Grassfields language of Cameroon, with approximately 420,000 speakers. The language is well known for its original script developed by King Njoya and his palace circle in the Kingdom of Bamum around 1895. Cameroonian musician Claude Ndam was a native speaker of the language and sang it in his music.
Momolu Duwalu Bukele was the proliferator of the Vai syllabary derived from the Poro Society, used for writing the Vai language of Liberia—one of several African languages to develop its own writing system.
The Tikar are a Central African ethnic group in Cameroon. The World Factbook formally identifies them as Grassfields. In Cameroon, they are informally and most commonly referred as Graffi They are known to be great artists, artisans and storytellers. Once a nomadic people, some oral traditions trace the origin of the Tikar people to the Nile River Valley in present-day Sudan. According to the Bamenda City Council the Tikari groups migrated from Northern Nigeria to settle in the highlands of western Cameroon. Such ethnic groups were referred to in the 1969 official statistics as "Semi-Bantus" and "Sudanese Negroes." They speak a Northern Bantoid language called Tikar. One of the few African ethnic groups to practice a monotheistic traditional religion, the Tikar refer to God the Creator by the name Nyuy. They also have an extensive spiritual system of ancestral reverence.
Seidou Njimoluh Njoya ruled the Bamum people of Cameroon from 1933 to 1992 as the Sultan of Foumban and Mfon of the Bamun. Njimoluh was the son of Ibrahim Njoya, and he was educated in French, English, and the bamum script developed by his father. In 1931, in order to break the power of the Bamun, French administrators had exiled Ibrahim Njoya to Yaoundé. The Bamum nobles had been scattered due to the French occupation, but they eventually chose Njimoluh from among Ibrahim Njoya's 177 children and reached an agreement with the French authorities. Seidou Njimoluh Njoya became the 18th mfon of the Bamum in June 1933 after the death of his father.
The Vai syllabary is a syllabic writing system devised for the Vai language by Momolu Duwalu Bukele of Jondu, in what is now Grand Cape Mount County, Liberia. Bukele is regarded within the Vai community, as well as by most scholars, as the syllabary's inventor and chief promoter when it was first documented in the 1830s. It is one of the two most successful indigenous scripts in West Africa in terms of the number of current users and the availability of literature written in the script, the other being N'Ko.
The writing systems of Africa refer to the current and historical practice of writing systems on the African continent, both indigenous and those introduced. In many African societies, history generally used to be recorded orally despite most societies having developed a writing script, leading to them being termed "oral civilisations" in contrast to "literate civilisations".
The Mende Kikakui script is a syllabary used for writing the Mende language of Sierra Leone.
Nji Oumarou Nchare is Co-Director of the Bamum Scripts and Archives Project in Foumban, Cameroon and Director of Cultural Affairs and Archivist at the Bamum Palace, Foumban. He is the founder (1978) of "Club Shümom" in Foumban, Director of the A-ka-u-ku and Shümom School Initiative, and hosts a regionally broadcast program on Radio Communautaire du Noun.
Sultan Ibrahim Njoyac. 1860 – c. 1933 in Yaoundé, was seventeenth in a long dynasty of kings that ruled over Bamum and its people in western Cameroon dating back to the fourteenth century. He succeeded his father Nsangu, and ruled from 1886 or 1887 until his death in 1933, when he was succeeded by his son, Seidou Njimoluh Njoya. He ruled from the ancient walled city of Fumban.
Kisimi Kamara (1890–1962) was a village tailor from Sierra Leone who was instrumental in promoting the Mende Kikakui script in the 1920s.
The Kingdom of Bamoun was a state in central Africa, part of what is now northwest Cameroon. It was founded by the Bamun, an ethnic group from northeast Cameroon. Its capital was the ancient walled city of Fumban. The kingdom came under control of German West Africa in 1916.
Kenneth Crosby (1904–1998) was a British Wesleyan missionary, a Bible translator and language scholar, who worked in Sierra Leone. He is best known for his work in the Mende language.
The Bamum scripts are an evolutionary series of six scripts created for the Bamum language by Ibrahim Njoya, King of Bamum. They are notable for evolving from a pictographic system to a semi-syllabary in the space of fourteen years, from 1896 to 1910. Bamum type was cast in 1918, but the script fell into disuse around 1931. A project began around 2007 to revive the Bamum script.
The Bagam or Eghap script is a partially deciphered Cameroonian script of several hundred characters. It was invented by King Pufong of the Bagam (Eghap) people, c. 1900, and used for letters and records, though it was never in wide use. It is reputedly based on the Bamum script, though the numerals show more resemblance to Bamum than the syllabograms do, and it does not appear to be a direct descendant. The only attested example is a paper by Louis Malcolm, a British officer who served in Cameroon in World War I. This was published without the characters in 1921, and the manuscript with characters was deposited in the library of Cambridge University. This was published in full in Tuchscherer (1999).
Nchare Yen, also referred to simply as Nchare, or by the English styling of the name as Nshare Yen, or just Nshare, was the founder of the Kingdom of Bamum, and one of the four kings who are mainly worshiped in the traditional Bamum religion due to their achievements in the Bamum society and culture. Nchare Yen is the brother of Ngon Nso, the founder of the Kingdom of Nso. Nchare Yen was the son of an unknown Tikar chief, who he and his sister broke away from to establish their own kingdoms. According to the book Rock of God, which discusses Nso's history,
Nso and Bamoun had been constantly quibbling, and to many, this seemed to be mostly sibling rivalry than any unavoidable conflict. Since Nso was founded by the sister, the brother always saw himself as the successor to the throne of Nso, according to the Tikar tradition that they both knew and respected.
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